this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
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I'm rather fond of this pair of axioms regarding the rule of law:
I see many of our modern problems as being rooted in laws and systems which neither protect nor bind everyone equally.
I can understand your desire for markets to handle things, but I don't think the global climate can be handled that way. Cap and trade means businesses get to shift their fossil emissions around while pretending they're helping. We already see this with companies which buy land that's already lush with old growth, then pretend like not clear-cutting it represents a reduction in carbon emissions equivalent to having planted all those trees. Giving corporate bad actors any opportunity to scam their way out of responsibility is the wrong approach.
LMAO yeah forest carbon capture offsets are total bullshit. The people who set up that system did not think it through, or at least they knew exactly what they were doing in order to let people game it.
A proper cap and trade system would require that in order to earn excess credits you must actually take carbon from the air and bury it in a non-volatile state at STP. Furthermore, you wouldn't earn credits at a 1:1 rate, something like 1 ton of credit for every 2 tons you bury would be more appropriate. Things like pumping sewage into an old oil well wouldn't count because you didn't pull that carbon out of the air yourself.
Regardless of if it's a market system or a prescriptive system, you have to make sure it's actually going to do what you want it to do. The Bush administration mandated E85 corn ethanol become a thing and we still haven't managed to actually make corn ethanol a fuel source in the aggregate, nevermind a carbon neutral energy source.
Would such a system work for microplastics? Honestly I think I'm more concerned about microplastics than emissions at this point. The shit's scary.
A cap and trade system? It would be a lot harder to set one up that worked the way you intended. Plastics are incredibly useful, health and environmental concerns aside. So you would have greater incentive to try and write in a bunch of exceptions or tailor things perfectly and it probably wouldn't work how you intended. My mind is thinking of loads of medical equipment that's best made with plastics, for just one example.
With carbon dioxide? Well, there's an easy way to generate credits by buying carbon, so you don't actually have to ban carbon fuels entirely, meaning planes and helicopters will still have their place. But I would have a tough time coming up with an easy way to filter out and sequester plastic contaminants, so there's not really a equivalency.
There's also the problem of trying to properly define just what the fuck a plastic even is. Is natural rubber a plastic? What about epoxy? Wax? The second you come up with a hard definition for plastic every manufacturer is going to look for alternatives that don't technically meet that definition.
Now, in my version of a carbon cap and trade market, it would focus entirely on what's underground. You have to buy credits to extract carbon from under ground, and you're awarded credits for returning it to under ground (at a less than 1:1 rate). The reason you do it that way is because it's just the easiest point of control. Fewer players involved, obvious locations for auditing
Anyway, this system would have the side-effect of also making plastic products more expensive so manufacturers would look for alternative materials and/or alternative sources of carbon. Probably a bit of both would be going on.
Probably the only thing you could really do is set up a broad definition for what a plastic is, then put in an excise tax on plastic and write in exceptions for things where we really need the material.
It's just a harder situation because we don't have good substitutes for most of the applications for plastic, which isn't true for carbon fuels.